<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2018 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Humans are terrible',
	'<{subtitle}>' => 'Written in <span title="Introduction to Philosophy">PHIL 1402</span> by <a href="https://y.st./">Alexand(er|ra) Yst</a>, finalised on 2018-08-08',
	'<{copyright year}>' => '2018',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<h2>Voltaire</h2>
<p>
	Honestly, I&apos;d love to write about Voltaire.
	His recognition of a need for reform matches very well with what I believe about my own time and place.
	However, his ideas don&apos;t match up well with the ideas of people around me.
	The instructions for this assignment say to focus on how our chosen philosopher is relevant to our respective cultures.
	My culture, free culture, is so diverse that it&apos;s hard to say what is relevant to it and not.
	It would take longer than a week and much more than three pages to discuss any philosopher from this week in the context of my culture.
	With that in mind, I&apos;ll focus on the popular culture of my area.
	However, I cannot stress this enough: this culture is not my own.
	This area has a lot of very backwards ideas, and I am in no way a part of these ideas.
</p>
<p>
	With that in mind, I&apos;ll instead write about Wang Yangming&apos;s ideas, which resonate very well with the culture of those around me.
</p>
<h2>Inner good</h2>
<p>
	Wang Yangming was of the opinion that everyone is innately good (Kim, n.d.).
	Their good has just been covered up and tainted by selfishness.
	This seems to match up very well with what people around me seem to think.
	People seem to think selfishness is the main bad characteristic, and without it, people care about one another.
	However, I haven&apos;t seen evidence to back this, myself.
	For many people, greed (a form of selfishness) seems to be their main motivating factor.
	Without greed, they wouldn&apos;t be who they are.
	I&apos;m not saying that makes their greed good, but it contradicts the idea that they&apos;re good underneath it all.
	If pretty much all they are is a ball of greed, what even is there underneath it all?
	The people that tend to exhibit this extreme are thankfully in the minority.
	The do go to show though that selfishness isn&apos;t a condition that covers up their inner good.
	It&apos;s not a blemish to be polished away, but a personality trait.
	It can be worked on, that&apos;s for sure.
	You can work on becoming less selfish.
	However, I don&apos;t believe that it&apos;s the case that by doing so, you&apos;re exposing who you really are and showing your inner goodness.
	Rather, you&apos;re changing, growing, evolving.
	You&apos;re <strong>*becoming*</strong> a better person, becoming better than you used to be.
</p>
<p>
	Lesser degrees of selfishness are present in the masses.
	Myself included, of course.
	I don&apos;t try to swindle people out of their privacy like the villains at Facebook and Google just to make a boatload of cash, for example, but I also don&apos;t spend as much time doing charity work as I could.
	Between terms, I sometimes try to give back to the community, but I certainly don&apos;t do anything charitable while school is in session.
	I could make time.
	But I don&apos;t.
	Because I&apos;m selfish and want time for my own personal projects; projects that don&apos;t even matter to anyone but me.
</p>
<h2>Evolution</h2>
<p>
	Selfishness is something we&apos;ve gotten through our evolution.
	When present in high degrees, it&apos;s toxic to other members our species.
	For that reason, we&apos;ve evolved to see selfishness in others to be a bad thing.
	We reject the people that exhibit extreme selfishness if we recognise it, so those people won&apos;t bring down the entire tribe.
	On the other end of the spectrum though, is extreme selflessness: the utter lack of selfishness.
	Without selfishness, we&apos;re very good for those around us.
	However, they become toxic to us, even if they don&apos;t mean to be.
	It&apos;s only through balance of selfishness and selflessness that we can be happy and mentally healthy.
</p>
<p>
	Imagine, if you will, a world in which everyone were completely selfless.
	It&apos;d be a less toxic world than we have today, that&apos;s for sure, but it&apos;d still be toxic.
	Why is that?
	Basically, none of us would care for ourselves.
	We might, if we were particularly bold, express our needs.
	Others would of course jump on board and help us whenever we did so.
	However, none of us would dare express our own petty wants.
	We wouldn&apos;t be happy.
	This hypothetical world is an extreme case of course, but it shows that thinking of oneself, selfishness, is needed in some small degree.
	With a tiny bit of selfishness in everyone, that hypothetical world could be a paradise.
	Completely ridding oneself of selfishness is unhealthy.
	So on that point, I again have to disagree with Wang Yangming.
</p>
<p>
	Now that we understand that selfishness is a part of human nature and that selfishness in small degrees is good, let&apos;s get back to looking at this on an evolutionary level.
	Why are humans as selfish as we are?
	We&apos;re not all as evil as Zuckerberg, but almost all of us are far more selfish than is good for society.
	Why don&apos;t we have a healthier balance?
	Again, it boils down to evolution.
	Survival.
	When you run into danger and give your life to save another, who lives to pass on their genes, and with them, parts of their personality?
	It certainly isn&apos;t you, the person that&apos;s clearly a good force in society.
	No.
	It&apos;s the person you saved.
	The most selfish, when recognised, become outcasts.
	But the most good-hearted people tend not to survive as long.
	People are terrible.
	And there&apos;s a very logical reason for that.
	We&apos;re just not as terrible as we could be.
</p>
<h2>Innate knowledge</h2>
<p>
	Another claim made by Wang Yangming was people have innate knowledge, and can rely on that to make decisions (Kim, n.d.).
	He thought that people not only could, but <strong>*should*</strong>.
	In other words, people don&apos;t need to do their research and actually analyse the situation to arrive at the correct conclusion.
	Again, this matches up very well with what most people around me seem to believe.
	They think they can just know better than experts about some topic they don&apos;t work with very often, but they get the answers wrong because they don&apos;t actually know anything about what they&apos;re talking about.
	When they&apos;re dealing with something within their own knowledge set, they perform quite well, but they think they can rely on &quot;common sense&quot; in situations in which they have no clue about.
</p>
<p>
	I fall victim to this type of thinking sometimes as well.
	A recent example involves some code I was working on.
	I was reading the documentation for the software I needed my program to interact with.
	The documentation told me exactly how the other software worked.
	It left out an explicit warning about the strange quirk it exhibits, but that quirk was in fact implied by the other claims in the documentation.
	I didn&apos;t believe what was stated though.
	It made no sense.
	There were eight possible indices.
	I assumed them to be <code>0</code>, <code>1</code>, <code>2</code>, <code>3</code>, <code>4</code>, <code>5</code>, <code>6</code>, and <code>7</code>, even though the implications of what the documentation said were that the real indices would be the expected ones multiplied by eight.
	My innate knowledge told me this couldn&apos;t be because it wouldn&apos;t match up with some other functionality of the software.
	My innate knowledge was wrong, as it often is.
	Instead, the related functionality <strong>*also*</strong> had its indices multiplied by eight with no explanation and no apparent reason.
	Intuition didn&apos;t get the job done, as it often doesn&apos;t, but if I&apos;d listened to the documentation, the documentation would&apos;ve pointed me in the right direction.
</p>
<p>
	Most people seem to think that innate knowledge, commonly known these days as &quot;common sense&quot;, overrules real knowledge.
	It doesn&apos;t.
	Even I fall victim to this illusion.
</p>
<h2>Misdirected confidence</h2>
<p>
	Wang Yangming thought that having confidence was key to having the correct solution (Kim, n.d.).
	The more confidence people had, the more likely their solution must be right.
	I think this sort of belief is present in most societies, at least in regards to the self.
	The more confident one is about their solution, the less willing they often are to consider that it might be wrong, even in the face of strong contradictory evidence.
</p>
<p>
	Confidence to a degree is useful.
	It keeps you from being wishy-washy.
	You don&apos;t change your mind with each passing moment.
	It allows you to stick to a plan that, even if slightly inefficient, is a million times more efficient than switching pland fifty times and continually having to start over.
	However, there comes a point when confidence is the enemy.
	Overly-confident people usually get the answer wrong, because they don&apos;t yield.
	Someone somewhat confident in their answer will persevere until compelling evidence is presented to make them change their mind.
	They stay the course for the most part, but change when change is warranted.
	Someone highly confident in their answer won&apos;t bend or budge though.
	Instead of updating their answer when enough new information arrives, they remain fixated on their original backwards answer.
</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>
	People are terrible.
	And a big part of what makes us so terrible is described to us as being good by Wang Yangming.
	We match his ideal pretty well, aside from the zero selfishness aspect.
	The only problem is that his ideal isn&apos;t actually very ideal at all.
	Even if we matched to the letter, and had no selfishness, that wouldn&apos;t save us.
	Wang Yangming&apos;s ideal just isn&apos;t something we should look up to.
	It&apos;s something we should aspire to be better than.
</p>
<div class="APA_references">
	<h2>References:</h2>
	<p>
		Kim, Y. (n.d.). Wang Yangming (Wang Shou-Jen) | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/wangyang/"><code>https://www.iep.utm.edu/wangyang/</code></a>
	</p>
</div>
END
);
